What to Buy a Grandchild Who Lives Far Away

Gift ideas for grandchildren you do not see often, including things that arrive more than once and give them a reason to write back.

There is a particular kind of thinking that goes into buying for a grandchild who lives three hours away, or three counties, or three time zones. You are not just choosing a present. You are trying to make something stand in for you.

Most gifts are not very good at that. They arrive, they are opened, they are lovely for an afternoon, and then they join the pile. By the time you next see your grandchild, they have forgotten which one was from you.

So here are some ideas that work harder, gathered from the sort of things families tell us actually stick.

Something that arrives more than once

This is the single biggest change you can make. One large present in December is one moment of excitement. The same money spread across several smaller arrivals gives you a presence in the house all year.

Post is the obvious version of this, and it is more powerful than people expect. A child who receives something addressed to them, in an envelope, with their own name on the front, will carry it around the house before they even open it. Very little else in modern childhood does that.

Something they can reply to

This is what turns a gift into a relationship. If your grandchild has a reason to write back, you have started a correspondence rather than completed a transaction.

You can begin this with nothing more than a postcard. Send one from wherever you are, even if it is only the local garden centre, and ask a question they can answer in one line. What did you have for tea. What is your favourite animal. Children answer questions far more readily than they write letters, because a question tells them what to say.

If you would like to make it easier, send the reply materials with the gift. A few envelopes already addressed to you, a book of stamps, some stickers. Take away every barrier except the writing itself.

Something that is not more plastic

Most parents of young children are quietly drowning. Storage is the constraint in a modern house, and the gift that requires a new shelf is the gift that gets resented, however kindly it was meant.

Things that pass this test tend to be flat, consumable, or beautiful enough to keep. Good art materials. A proper hardback book with an inscription in the front. A subscription. Anything that arrives through the letterbox rather than needing a courier.

Something with your handwriting in it

Whatever you buy, write in it. Inside the cover, on a card, on the back of a photograph. Grandchildren keep handwriting long after they have lost the object it came with. One family we know keeps a shoebox of their grandfather's letters and takes it out the way you would take out a favourite book.

A few specific ideas

A book subscription. Good for older children who read independently, and easy to gift for three or six months.

Art materials that are better than school ones. Real watercolours, proper brushes, thick paper. Children notice quality in materials long before they can explain it.

A photograph album you fill together. Send it half full and post the other photographs a few at a time.

A letter subscription. This is the one that does most of the work in this article, because it arrives monthly, it is addressed to the child, and it gives them something to reply to.

What we make, in case it is useful

The Toadstool Post is a monthly letter for children aged three to eight, and it is made about as far from a factory as it is possible to get. Every illustration is painted by hand in watercolour by Immi, our illustrator and co-founder, in Dorset. Nothing in it is generated by a computer, which is becoming rarer in children's publishing than it should be.

Each month an envelope arrives with the child's name on it, containing a letter from the woodland and a new page for their Adventure Journal. The journal is the part grandparents tend to like most. Rather than accumulating loose bits of paper, the pages build into one growing book, so by the sixth month there is a real object on the shelf that did not exist before, and every page of it arrived in the post.

The letters come from five characters, Fox, Badger, Squirrel, Hedgehog and Robin, who live at a woodland post office and who children get to know over time in the way they get to know characters in a series. Immi holds a Masters in the psychology of education, and it shows in the small decisions: the letters are short on purpose, the activity comes before the story for a reason, and the reading level shifts across the year so it grows with the child rather than being outgrown by them.

It is £11.99 a month, there is a discount for siblings so cousins can be added easily, and it can be cancelled at any time.